Empirical Assessment of Innovation in the Law of Civil Commitment: A Critique

Abstract

The history of commitment law in the United States has been marked by a series of pendular swings corresponding to popular concerns of the day. From the inception of civil commitment law in the 1830s and 1840s. with a system in which discretion was lodged primarily in family members and physicians, there have been moves to restrict the ease of commitment when concerns about inappropriate admissions or institutional abuses were at their height (e.g., in the 1870s, 1930s, and 1970s) and countervailing efforts to increase the ease of commitment when concerns about the ready availability of treatment predominated (e.g., around the turn of the century and in the 1950s).Students of the history of civil commitment will quickly recognize that these shifts in policy were based almost entirely on theoretical arguments about the relative desirability of one or the other approach, fueled by horror stories illustrating the pitfalls of the competing orientation.